Posted on 03/14/2025 8:55:18 PM PDT by DoodleBob
What does an eclipse look like from the moon? Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander just sent back a stunning image from the lunar surface.
The commercial space company's lander, which touched down on the moon without a hitch on March 2 as part of a mission for NASA, took a high-definition image of the eclipse from its top deck in the early hours of Friday — and it's mighty beautiful.
"Blue Ghost got her first diamond ring! Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth," Firefly Aerospace wrote online. (A "diamond ring" effect happens during a total solar eclipse when the sun just begins to appear from behind Earth; it also happens just before Earth totally blocks the sun.)
From our perch on Earth, it was a total lunar eclipse, and from the moon it was a total solar eclipse. These unique events happen when the sun, Earth, and moon align, allowing Earth to cast a shadow on the moon and block most sunlight from reaching the lunar surface. But our planet's atmosphere still allows red wavelengths of light to squeeze through and travel through space, illuminating the moon in reddish, rusty, orangish, or crimson colors.
(Excerpt) Read more at mashable.com ...
I walked outside and saw it. I am good. The color was awesome!
I don’t see the Moon sooooo....
I was at work all night last night. Watched for it, but it was overcast.
That pic makes up for it, though.
Awesome!
However, to enjoy these pictures, we need information on the diversity of the R&D staff that conceived, developed, and launched it.
Ping
-PJ
Super cool!
The Little Lander That Could....and did!
So the Earth perfectly obscures the sun when seen from the moon. And the moon perfectly obscures the sun when seen from Earth.
How is that possible given how different the diameter of the Earth and the moon are?
From the Moon’s point of view the Earth is always in the same place. It is the Sun which moves behind the Earth.
Yes the diameters are vastly different, so better terminology would be that the earth fully obscures or blocks the sun when viewed from the moon. The reason you still see a ring around the earth from the moon is because the earth’s atmosphere is not constant density, so it refracts some of the sunlight around the earth, which reaches you or your camera on the moon and looks like a ring around the earth.
On the flip side, a halo does show up when the moon obscures the sun in a solar eclipse, but for a completely different reason. That is because the moon has no atmosphere to diffract or bend the sunlight. The halo in a solar eclipse comes from the hot corona gases spewing out from the sun which extend far from the surface. The corona gases are dimmer than the main orb of the sun, but they become visible when the moon perfectly obscures the bright orb of the sun in a solar eclipse. It does so because the diameters and the distances are perfect for obsuring the sun by the moon, but when you are on the moon, the earth more than perfectly obscures the sun, but as I said, some of the light is bent around the earth by the atmosphere which you see as a halo when on the moon.
The moonscape turns red as the Sun begins its motion behind the Earth. During the eclipse it got so cold the antenna had to wait so that it could warm up enough to broadcast the images.
View from space of the 2017 Solar Eclipse across America.
Without digging into the geometry, I'd guess that the orbits and distance are related to the relative mass of the objects. IOW, it might not be a coincidence, but a result of the physics.
I'm sure someone more familiar with the physics can "weigh in."
Got it — makes perfect sense.
The Earth as seen from the moon more than covers the sun but we still see a bright ring around it because of its atmosphere. This gives the impression that the Earth exactly covers the sun but that’s not the case.
Thanks for explaining!
I saw a picture kinda like that on my last colonoscopy video.
I tried to photograph last night’s lunar eclipse. I did not know how to turn of the back screen and the auto focus went cray cray. I managed an 1/8 second exposure without a tripod. I should have brought the tripod.
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